Chemistry between actors might make or break series

Saturday

Nov 16, 2013 at 12:01 AMNov 16, 2013 at 12:11 PM

Do the actors click? Do their characters mesh? Do viewers enjoy spending time with them? Many elements determine the success of a TV show - subject, budget, time slot. Sometimes, though, a series rises or falls on the strength of two pivotal performers.

Do the actors click?

Do their characters mesh?

Do viewers enjoy spending time with them?

Many elements determine the success of a TV show - subject, budget, time slot.

Sometimes, though, a series rises or falls on the strength of two pivotal performers.

The new season offers some illuminating examples.

A show with a crucial pairing represents the TV version of a two-hander: Laverne & Shirley, Cagney & Lacey, Psych.

Not to mention any other show with plenty of characters but only two who really matter.

The reigning example might be found in Bones, the Fox procedural that stars David Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel as an opposites-attract investigative team.

The series and the co-stars took time to hone a working formula - and nine seasons later, with the lead characters in a personal as well as a professional relationship, Bones offers as much comfort as old slippers.

This fall, several shows put a lot of weight on the shoulders of two actors - for better or worse.

A sampling:

Working nicely

The improbable description of Sleepy Hollow on Fox suggested a novelty at best.

Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison) awakens in the 21st century to find the headless horseman - one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - there, too. Crane forms an alliance with a deputy sheriff, Abbie Mills (Nicole Beharie), to battle the malevolent forces unleashed.

Mison, Beharie and the people writing their dialogue have elevated the premise from the B-

movie horror concoction it might have become to a witty, smart blend whose characters - despite the fantasy framework - are believable.

Mills and Crane are about as different as two people can be: She's black; he's white. She's Internet-age; he's pre-electricity. Beharie and Mison work these contrasts with a subtle humor that helps offset the gruesome goings-on.

Working but wobbly

Although NBC is still the butt of a lot of jokes, it might have the fall's most addictive new series in The Blacklist. James Spader plays Red Reddington, a creepy criminal who decides he wants to help the FBI catch even creepier criminals but only if he can work with Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone), a young FBI profiler.

Spader is in something of a straitjacket, forced to be annoyingly coy and emotionless. And Boone's character is an increasingly improbable combination of dumb and smart, taking an inordinate amount of time to ask the question that viewers were asking halfway through the pilot: Might Red be her long-lost father?

The actors, though, have made the show worth watching. Boone manages to be alternately vulnerable and annoyed, while Spader does his cryptic thing. The writers, though, have some work to do to keep the premise plausible.

Progressing

The new show with the most attention-getting pair of names atop the bill might well have been the CBS comedy The Crazy Ones. It stars Robin Williams, a comedy god to many, as an aging adman and Sarah Michelle Gellar of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame as his daughter and co-worker.

The pilot didn't bode well for the series. Williams was doing his Robin Williams shtick, while Gellar and everyone else around him was acting. It was clumsy and, worse, laugh-free.

But, as the weeks went along, a funny thing started to happen, in several senses. Gellar began to learn how to react to Williams' excesses - she can be deadly with the deadpan expression - and, more important, began to assert her comedy credentials.

Williams is still doing his Robin Williams imitation, but Gellar has become the most amusing actor on the show. Among other things, that has helped sell the notion that her character is indeed the daughter of Williams' unhinged one.

Not working, Part 1

On Back in the Game on ABC, James Caan is a crusty former minor league baseball player who ends up coaching a team of kiddie misfits that includes his grandson. The pairing isn't so much Caan and the child, who is played by Griffin Gluck. It's Caan and the entire team - which includes a flamboyantly gay boy, a pudgy lad and other unathletic types.

Caan adopts the growly, reluctant coach character familiar from numerous movies with the same structure, and the boys deliver their klutzy, cutesy moments. But none of it is particularly convincing. Plotlines unrelated to the team are sometimes amusing, but, on the ball field, the show is content to regurgitate a creaky formula. None of the actors, young or old, has found a way to make it new.

ABC has canceled the show but will air the entire 13-episode season.

Not working, Parts 2 and 3

The Fox sitcom Dads might be the most awful new comedy that has survived into November. (Inexplicably, it has even been extended.)

It's about two friends in their 30s (Seth Green and Giovanni Ribisi) whose fathers move in with them. It might sound like an ensemble comedy, but it's more like two two-

handers in the same show: a pair of sons and their dads.

Ribisi's father is played by Martin Mull, but there must have been a mix-up at the hospital: There is no way that Mull's character, a moron, could have begotten Ribisi's. Sure, not all children are younger versions of their parents, but these two seem to be strangers.

Green and Peter Riegert, who plays his father, are even less comfortable together. Both have respectable TV credentials, but they are wasted by the witless show, forced to swap distasteful one-liners without zest or conviction. Some real father-and-son pairs might interact in such a way, but you wouldn't want them in your living room.